Josef Mengele Essays - Josef Mengele, Nazis In South America

Josef Mengele Fifteen years ago the world let out a sigh of relief with the discovery of 208 bones and a few rags. For over forty years survivors of the Nazi death camps known as Auschwitz were haunted by the vision of the handsome, well dressed man with a caring smile who pointed his white-gloved finger either left or right deciding who lived (at least for the moment) and who died. Those who passed this man and survived have always remembered the man known as the Angel of Death. These are the people who question the identification of these bones as those of SS doctor Josef Mengele. Josef Mengele was the eldest son of Karl and Walburga Mengele of G?nzburg, Bavaria. Karl Mengele ran a machine tools factory and often put his eldest son Beppo, as he was known then, in charge of overseeing the transport of all goods to and from the factory (Drekel 29). Beppo was always happy when the transports arrived and years later an older Beppo still delighted at the arrival of trains and their cargoes, but at a different railway stop (30). Mengeles childhood was one of privilege. His family was upper middle class and Beppo was well liked by the townspeople. Most townspeople recall an innocence and sweetness to him (31). Josef Mengele was a promising student and went to Munich to study racial theories under the philosopher of National Socialism Alfred Rosenburg (THHP par.2). He then moved to Frankfurt-am-Main to receive his medical degree and study under Otmar von Verschuer. Verschuer was the director of the Institute for Racial Hygiene at the University of Frankfurt and is who began Mengele with his studies on genetic engineering (par. 2). By the time Mengele received his medical degree he was a member of both the National Socialist Party and the SS (par.2). Mengele did serve in battle and although there is little mention of the details of his service it is known that he was wounded while on the Eastern front (Astor 28). Mengele was sent back to Germany to recover and was awarded an Iron Cross First Degree, Iron Cross Second Degree and the standard decoration for service against the Red armies (28). It was after he recovered that Mengele volunteered as camp doctor at an installation in the southwest of Poland known as Auschwitz (29). Dr. Mengele took his new position with the stated mission to perform research on human genetics. His mentor, Verschuer, had secured a grant through the German Research Council to fund Mengeles work (Lynott screen 2). Dr. Mengele wanted to create a Germanic super-race by unlocking genetic engineering secrets and devising methods for eradicating inferior gene strands from the human population (screen 2). His most passionate interest soon became twins. Twins were the perfect specimens because one twin could act as the control while the other was endlessly experimented on. This passion is what drove Mengele to the arrival ramps at Auschwitz. In just over a year that Mengele was at the camp he is known to be present for at least 74 arrivals (Gilbert 582), but with 70 to 90 percent of new arrivals being sent immediately to the gas chamber after stepping off the train (Lynott screen 1) who knows how many other arrivals Mengele was at that no one has survived to recall. Mengeles selection process was very systematic. Young men and women aged eighteen to thirty-five that looked strong were sent to the left to slave labor. The rest, consisting of the old, the very young children and their mothers, the sick, and the weak were sent to the right to the gas chamber (Astor 55). Mothers with very young children and mothers with children who had died in transport, as many did, were sent to the gas chamber because, as Mengele himself said, mothers wont work well if they know their children are dead, (60). Mengele selected certain people from the new arrivals for his own personal group. Anyone with certain abnormalities, such as dwarfs, midgets, hunchbacks along with other birth defects, and twins were sent to a special block where Mengele could perform his research (THHP par.7). The building in which Mengele housed his specimens was Block

Browning Peal Essay Essays

Browning Peal Essay Essays Browning Peal Essay Essay Browning Peal Essay Essay Browning PEAL Essay Robert Browning uses many techniques one such example being his continuous reference to women being similar to roses. Browning uses the imagery of roses throughout the poem to represent women and femininity. It is a common practice in literature for poets to refer to women as flowers, in particular roses; such as Browning has done in ‘Women and Roses’. This is because they represent natural beauty that has been created by God, which compliments the woman Browning is talking about because it shows his feelings on how he believes they don’t have to try to be beautiful. Roses also represent love and passion, the colour red is an intimate colour that represents seduction and sometimes danger as seen in ‘Of Mice and Men’ where Curley’s wife is referred to as having â€Å"full rouged lips† and â€Å"red fingernails†. The thorns on roses continues this theme of potential risk, because the simple idea of men picking roses for women could injure the man due to the thorns on the stem, this could represent how men have to fight past the hard things in love to get to the beauty or the woman. In ‘Women and Roses’, Browning also uses roses as a representation of the stages through a woman’s life going into womanhood and how she grows from a young shoot full of promise to something incredibly beautiful and natural and eventually to an old and wilted flower, â€Å"bees pass it unimpeached†. The poem is about finding perfect love with a woman, which is represented as finding a rose with no thorns, thorns being the trouble in a relationship or a woman. Browning wrote ‘Prospice’ after his beloved wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, died in 1861. The poem shows Browning’s beliefs on death and how he feels that he will once again be reunited with his love in the afterlife. The title Prospice can be translated as ‘look forward’, and in this poem, published in 1864, Browning is most likely looking forward to death, when he expects ‘I will clasp thee again’, meaning he will be with Elizabeth once more. Such optimism seems to contrast noticeably with the religious doubt or searching of many Victorian writers. But Browning does not claim that there is anything easy about facing death, instead he shows one way of coping. He gives the ‘Arch Fear’, death, a ‘visible form’ so that he can imagine taking him on in one last fight to show that he will not be taken easily, Barriers’ and ‘guerdon’ suggest a tournament took place. In ‘A Woman’s Last Word’ Browning uses Roman numerals to show the breaking down of a omplex subject such as a woman’s feelings after an argument. By doing this it makes it easier for the reader to follow and distinguish the different stages of feelings the character goes through and also shows the changes in direction of her attitude until she reaches submission towards her love. This is a good technique used as he wrote the poem from a woman’s point of view and has gone into a lot of deta il on how she feels and reacts to the argument.